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Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

In the field of morphology, productivity is one of the most discussed concepts.It can be described as the possibility of creating new words. Discussion hasfocused on the analysis of the nature of what we call productivity intodifferent aspects as well as on the degree to which rules have this property.This book works towards a new measure for productivity. It differs from mostother studies in this domain in concentrating on compounding rather thanaffixation. The author refers to his MA thesis (2006) and to his PhD thesis(2008), both of which are about measuring productivity, but I have not found anyexplicit statement of how the book relates to these theses.

SUMMARY

The book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 (1-8) is a brief introduction,giving some methodological background and a chapter overview. A set of compoundswas extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC) and analysed semanticallyin terms of Levi's (1978) Recoverably Deletable Predicates (RDPs).

Chapter 2 (9-44) introduces compounding. After introducing headedness andvarious systems of characterizing and classifying the relationship between thecomponents of a compound, the author gives an overview of English compoundsfollowing Bauer & Huddleston (2002). Section 2.4, roughly half of the chapter,is devoted to the question of how to distinguish compounding from syntax. Afteran overview of various proposals, the conclusion is that no clear criteria havebeen found. Some authors model the transition as a cline.

Chapter 3 (45-99) is devoted to morphological productivity. It starts byintroducing a number of dichotomies. The first is between the process(''Wortbilding'') and the outcome (''Wortgebildetheit''). Then productivity isopposed to creativity, in which intentionality plays a role, and finallyavailability, a qualitative notion, to profitability, which is quantitative.After this, a section is devoted to factors influencing productivity, bothenhancers and constraints. Among the latter, blocking has been studied a lot.Finally, attempts to distinguish different degrees of productivity arepresented. A large part of this section is devoted to the stages in the life ofa word until it is lexicalized.

Chapter 4 (101-169) presents different approaches to measuring productivity andapplies some of them to the set of compounds retrieved from the BNC andclassified as to their RDP. The simplest method is to count types and tokens ofthe result of a word formation rule in a large corpus. Aronoff (1976) proposedto relate the number of actual types to the number of potential types, butrealized that such calculations are not feasible in practice. Harald Baayenproposed different measures based on the number of hapaxes in a corpus.Stekauer's onomasiological approach concentrates on the process of naming aconcept. As this process is always successful, the total productivity must be100%. Ingo Plag and Laurie Bauer proposed measures based on neologisms found ina dictionary, but this is not so useful for compounds. Jennifer Hay proposed tolook at the frequency of the derived item in relation to the frequency of thebase and to whether the phonotactic sequence at the boundary of the base and theaffix can occur also morpheme-internally. The idea is that if the derivation isrelatively rare and phonotactically marked, it is more likely to be processedonline. Calculating the relative frequency for compounds is not straightforward,because compounds have two bases.

In the final section of chapter 4 (147-168), the author presents his ownproposal for a productivity measure. He proposes an indicator of profitability(lower case pi) which is the number of types in a corpus (V) divided by thenumber of tokens in the same corpus (N). Pi should only be calculated if thenumber of types is sufficiently high, but the threshold (which he calls the''Minimal V-Input'') depends on the corpus. At the moment there is not enoughevidence to give any specific value. A second measure is the trend ofprofitability (upper case PI). It is a table of V and N, in which thedevelopment of the increase of the two is plotted when V increases. These twomeasures, pi and PI, are applied to the nine RDPs.

Chapter 5 (171-176) briefly summarizes the conclusions of the study.

EVALUATION

Before I address the content of the book, I would like to make some observationsabout its form and style. The book is marked first of all by a ratheridiosyncratic use of English lexis and word order. Although in most cases thisdoes not affect understanding, the book would have been generally more pleasantto read if it had been properly proofread by a native speaker. A second pointconcerns the way references are built into the text. There are many references,but often their main purpose seems to be to impress the reader by suggesting avery wide reading. I have no reason to doubt the author's wide reading, but Ifind it irritating to read lists of references preceded by ''see also'' withoutany further discussion. In many cases, the references following ''see also'' donot seem to support the preceding statement, but only to say something about thetopic. It would have been preferable if a selection of these references had beenproperly discussed. A final point concerns the structure of sections, inparticular in chapters 2 and 3. These sections give a catalogue of alternativeviews without developing an argument as to which of them is to be preferred. Ifit is not necessary to make such a point, one wonders why these sections arethere in the first place.

In fact, large parts of the book are devoted to contextualizing the mainargument. The author's own contribution is limited to the final section ofchapter 4 and the evaluation for compounding of three of the other productivitymeasures. These sections build on an uncritical and apparently unreflected useof Levi's (1978) set of RDPs. There are two major problems with this. First,Levi's system of RDPs has been heavily criticized and this criticism should havebeen addressed. Secondly, the RDPs are used in a way that does not seem to becompatible with Levi's original intention.

Levi proposed RDPs as a characterization of the relation between the twocomponents of a compound (actually a ''complex nominal'', but I will ignore thedifference here). Her choice of predicates has been criticized for at least fourreasons. First, some predicates are excessively vague, e.g. both ''fertilitypills'' and ''headache pills'' are characterized as FOR. Second, there is asignificant overlap between predicates, e.g. ''party members'' can be HAVE or IN.Third, RDPs are designated by English words, and tend to exploit the range ofmeanings these words have in English. Thus, HAVE is used for ''horse leg'' as wellas for ''student problems''. Finally, the predicates are not exhaustive, asDowning (1977) illustrated with the famous example of ''apple-juice seat''.

Apart from their deficiencies in characterizing the relationship between thecomponents of a compound, RDPs are not used in the originally intended way whentheir productivity is compared. Levi's (1978) theory was based on GenerativeSemantics. This does not exclude its use in a different framework, but theproblems raised by transplanting it to a new framework should have beendiscussed. Levi intended the RDPs as a way to reconcile the transformationalderivation of compounds with the requirement that deleted material should berecoverable. They are meant to operate together with a system where deepstructure predicates that are part of a deverbal head are also available. InGenerative Semantics, this not only includes cases such as ''truck driver'', butalso cases such as ''car thief'', where ''thief'' is equivalent to ''stealer'' in deepstructure. Therefore, RDPs do not have to account for these cases. Forproductive, non-lexicalized compounds, there is a sequence of transformationsdeleting parts of the underlying sentence, including the RDPs. Levi assumes thata compound is at least 12-ways ambiguous, because there are nine RDPs and threeof them can be used in active and passive readings. If there is a deverbal head,further readings are added. Only lexicalized compounds have a single meaning,which can of course be much more specialized than an RDP.

The author of this book also fails to mention that three RDPs can be used inactive and passive readings and seems to assume that there are nine compoundingrules in competition with each other. Disambiguation only occurs on the basis ofcontext, however, or when the compound is lexicalized. Therefore, there musthave been many classification problems. However, all of the assumptions relatingto RDPs and problems in applying them remain entirely implicit. It is as if theauthor takes Levi's RDPs to be a mainstream device for which no discussion isnecessary. In the absence of any such discussion, however, it is hard tointerpret the figures that emerge from the experiments. While a lot of contextof the research is given, most of chapters 2 and 3, for which the lack of aconclusion suggest that it is not essential for the actual research, crucialissues relating to the origin and use of RDPs are not mentioned at all.

In conclusion, the book shows that the author is familiar with a large amount ofliterature in the field of morphology. In presenting this material, he does notintegrate the various views and for most of the issues he discusses he does notdevelop a view of his own. The main point of the book is a study of productivityof compounding. This study suffers from serious methodological problems in itsbasic setup.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Pius ten Hacken is senior lecturer in linguistics and translation at the
Department of Translation and Digital Communication of Swansea University.
His research interests include morphology, terminology, and the lexicon. He
published his PhD 'Defining Morphology' in 1994. His latest book is
'Chomskyan Linguistics and its Competitors' (London: Equinox, 2007).